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The balancing traveling salesman problem: application to warehouse order picking

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Abstract

This paper discusses the problem of predicting the length of Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) tour in dynamic and uncertain environments. Our findings, which are guided by extensive simulation runs, provide statistical estimations for the tour length under different scenarios. One of the applications that can benefit from these estimates includes warehouse order picking, which has seen increased importance due to online shopping. The utility of statistical estimates for TSP tour length for order picking is demonstrated on a common warehouse layout.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank two anonymous referees for their insightful comments on the earlier versions of this paper. Addressing these comments has led to a much improved manuscript.

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Correspondence to Rajan Batta.

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Madani, A., Batta, R. & Karwan, M. The balancing traveling salesman problem: application to warehouse order picking. TOP 29, 442–469 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11750-020-00557-y

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